That probably is easier, but I won't put anything of mine in the so called cloud. Not Dropbox, Googles, Amazons or anyone elses storage space. portable disks are cheap now a days and getting bigger and cheaper. There is no need to put any of your property in someones elses control to risk losing it.

Well, with Dropbox your content is only mirrored on the cloud. You have copies of all your files in the Dropbox folder on your PC, and indeed automatically backed up to any other PCs, such as your laptop, that you have connected to the same Dropbox account.